Precipice
by La Reine Noire
Summary: She can feel the wind whistling behind her. The gorge yawns below, lush forest and rocks and waterfall. Cora would call it beautiful. Alice sees only death.


_(Keep away from the edge)_

_The ropes no longer chafe at her wrists, but their hands are just as rough, their grip hard and unyielding. Even so, she cannot feel it, has ceased to feel anything after so many long hours bound. Even the blood seems to belong to someone else. They drag her forward, tripping over her mud-streaked skirts. But they do keep her to the far side of the path._

_(Away from the edge, Alice. It's too dangerous, dearest.)_

Alice has spent her life keeping away from the edge. That is Cora's province. Cora, who is frightened of nothing. It is Cora who climbs onto the roof of their home in Portman Square, her nightgown flapping round her like wings. Alice watches in awestruck terror as her sister scampers about, light-footed as any dancer.

"Oh, Alice, you can see everything from here! I can see the roof of St Paul's to the east and Westminster too!"

Alice's heart is hammering. She has seen a man fall from a roof before, seen a face smashed to an unrecognisable pulp upon the cobblestones. Papa dragged her away, but not quickly enough.

Cora slips, and a strangled cry escapes from Alice's mouth. But her sister rights herself and slips back into the bedroom, eyes bright with excitement. "I'll take you up there sometime, Alice."

But Alice never asks.

_They walk in single file, an army of ants against the sheer walls. None of them speak, and the dead-eyed man whose name nobody ever thought to tell her strides ahead, his anger fuelling his speed. She is his prize, for what reason she cannot possibly imagine. Alice has never been the prize, has never wished to be._

_Her eyes cast about wildly, over her shoulder, across the horizon. What she looks for, she does not even know. They have left Cora behind somewhere. Cora cannot protect her now._

To Alice, Cora has always been the protector. Not Papa, for he was so rarely there. A strong presence, to be certain, but always far away. Where he was needed, Cora always said. Alice has never pointed out that perhaps they needed him too. That their lives, as regimented as that of any of his soldiers, might have benefited from his presence.

Instead of Papa, there is Duncan. Duncan who would protect Cora from everything if she simply gave him the chance.

Alice would never tell him, but Cora does not need protection. She battles against it with all her strength, and Cora has always been strong. Alice, safe in her sister's shadow, is content to watch the officer charge over and over against Cora's bewildered refusals. He never once looks at Alice, seeing only the coltish child, not old enough to be bothered with. She wishes he might have spoken to her and saved himself a great deal of wasted effort. Duncan always follows rules; he prides himself upon it. He cannot understand Cora's need to break them.

Even Alice is not certain that she understands. The rules exist for a reason, surely. But Cora only sighs in frustration. "But don't you feel smothered, Alice?"

Sometimes, she wants to admit. Sometimes, when Cora and Duncan both take it upon themselves to treat her like a child of four who knows no better. But she says nothing.

Not very long after that, Duncan departs for the Colonies. It is six months before a letter arrives from Papa, asking them to join him there as well. Cora is reluctant to see Duncan again. Alice smiles to herself and thinks it will be a great adventure, the first she's ever had.

_Commotion ahead, beyond a clump of fallen boulders. The sound she has come to know well, that awful sound of thick-hewn blades meeting flesh, the blast of gunfire. Someone is coming._

_Her captors draw her back against the trees, though Alice tries to see. They go forward, one by one, and they die. She bites back the laughter welling wild and hysterical within. Is it Cora's wild man--she has trouble thinking of him as Nathaniel--back there? The one her sister's eyes follow as Duncan's eyes have always followed her?_

Nathaniel frightens Alice, did so from the first time she ever set eyes on him. A man straddling both the world she knows--he does speak English after all, even if it is with that odd Colonial accent--and the other. Where innocent women and children are put to the knife and left to rot by their friends. Where savages burst forth from behind trees that could not possibly have hidden them and slaughter entire regiments without a second thought.

The savagery fascinates her sister. She loves this place for its wildness, the strangeness mirrored in her own blood. And Alice, she just watches. Watches as her sister falls desperately in love and wonders if she will ever have that courage.

An adventure, she told Duncan back in Albany. All her thoughts were of the stories she might tell back in London of her journey into the wilderness. Perhaps she might see a red man or two. An adventure, indeed. Nobody in Portman Square would believe her if she told these stories.

She thought all would be well when they threw open the gates of the besieged Fort William Henry and she saw Papa. At first, she barely heard his words, that it wasn't safe, that the French were coming closer and he'd told them to stay behind. But then he and Duncan spoke of the Mohawk scout's betrayal. A man with dead eyes, Alice vaguely remembered, whose gaze made her shudder, who had orchestrated the massacre of their escort.

But it had been the attack that brought their particular rescuers. Only Duncan and Cora argued at all. Alice had only wondered at the releasing of their horses. Any doubts she had about the strange man who both looked like them and did not, and his two alien companions, she kept to herself. Odd they might be, and perhaps even savage, but they are not traitors, no matter what Papa and Duncan say. Papa speaks from frustration and Duncan from jealousy as Cora rages blindly at them both. Alice tends to the wounded and contents herself with being quietly useful.

It grows harder not to notice Nathaniel's companion everywhere she turns. Especially since she can no longer be Cora's silent shadow. Where Cora goes now, down that path of passion and madness and despair, she cannot follow. He seems to understand, the strange silent red man. After all, what is Nathaniel to him but what Cora is to her?

_She sees him now. Darker than Nathaniel, but quick and deadly. He cuts down three--four, maybe--before the dead-eyed man finds him. Alice lunges forward again, but they hold her back._

_He looks at her and there is love in his eyes. Not like Cora's, too hot to touch, but quieter, gentler. She remembers seeing it before, beneath the waterfall, when he drew her back from the edge._

_Always the edge, and they are moving closer to it. He is fast, but the dead-eyed man is faster. One slash across his chest and she knows she is about to watch him die. She cannot look, pulls herself free and turns away. Cora could watch, but Alice has never been brave. Not really._

Alice loved the military parades when she was young. The pristine uniforms, the perfectly polished buttons and starched white stock, and the flawless lines as the soldiers marched past the window. She was never permitted in the streets--it was not a fit place for a lady--but she always leant from the window and waved her handkerchief. If one or two dashing young men offered her flashing smiles in response, she spoke of it to no-one.

The only soldiers she remembers now are dead. Their formations do no good when the enemy does not play by civilised rules. She cannot forget the screams, wild and unearthly, rising from the woods all around them as she clung to Cora for dear life. Or the blood darkening the red uniforms, the sickening crunch of breaking bones. Unlike the first time, she cannot help but stare, frozen in horror, until Cora pulls her away.

Cora does not know that she saw their father die. Saw him dragged from his horse, his heart ripped out by the dead-eyed man. She could not move, could not cry out. Not even when one of them nearly did the same to her. It was Cora who stopped him, who took the blow meant for Alice, and it was Nathaniel who came for her.

But Alice cannot see the desperate relief on her sister's face; all she sees is the bloody swathe of bodies Nathaniel leaves in his wake. She follows blindly.

_He staggers to his feet, and she forces herself to watch. It is the least he deserves, for loving her. The dead-eyed man slashes over and over, small horrible cuts, and shoves the body over the edge of the precipice._

_She moves forward without even realising it, feet scuffing across the rock. The dead-eyed man is watching her now and she feels his gaze like a thousand crawling insects but she does not look away. For the first time in her life, she will not look away. From somewhere in the forest, a man's voice screams a word she cannot understand, but that she recognises._

_Uncas. That was his name._

He frightens her too, but only at first. There is a queer sense of kinship, that of younger siblings, those who do not burn as brightly. He understands as Cora and Duncan and Papa never will.

They speak but rarely. His English is better than she might have expected; she cannot even contemplate his language. And Uncas does not like words, she suspects. They never do seem to grasp everything one might wish them to.

She has not spoken since the massacre. Cora and Nathaniel whisper to one another; even though she cannot see--her eyes trapped by the cascade of water barely inches from her face--she knows. She wonders what it might be like to touch those crystalline droplets, to pass through that sheet of glimmering silver into...she cannot say what. Logically, she knows there is nothing on the other side, only a sheer drop into the river, but she moves in a dream, her feet inching forward along the slippery rocks.

He pulls her back, Uncas does. Cradles her as Nathaniel does Cora, and Alice finally closes her eyes. But she does not cry. Her tears have long been spent.

_She can feel the wind whistling behind her. The gorge yawns below, lush forest and rocks and waterfall. Cora would call it beautiful. Alice sees only death._

_Ever since they left Albany, it is all she has seen. The regiment slaughtered in the woods, soldiers at the fort blown to bits by cannonfire, the peaceful green clearing now filled with corpses stacked like cordwood. Men and women, soldiers and children. Duncan and Cora, left behind and lost. There is only Alice now. Only she can save herself._

_Alice meets the eyes, bloody and hungry as they are. For a second, though, she sees something else. A flash of tenderness, more terrifying than the lack she saw before. He reaches for her. There is blood on his hand. His blood. Uncas' blood._

_She takes another step. Her heels hang over the edge. Alice looks over her shoulder._

_It would be quick. The questions would be answered. There would be no more waiting, no more dreading. And what would she leave behind but death? Cora can care for herself; she always has. She will be a burden to her sister no longer. For the first time in her life, she makes her decision._

_She has always wished she could fly._

_(Keep away from the--)_

_Alice steps backward into the air._

**NB:** Written for the Livejournal Femgenficathon 2006, Prompt #36. _I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other._ --Harriet Tubman. I read the book years ago but have blocked it from my mind due to how little I enjoyed it, so this is purely canon and extrapolation from the film. Many thanks to Rosamund for inspiration both direct and indirect, and to WinterofourDiscontent for the quick beta.


End file.
